DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Bad Science Part II: Covid-19 escaped from a lab!

It didn't escape from a lab.

Scientists did a deep dive on the elements of this bug, and a lab technician would not have designed a virus in the way Covid operates.

Check the fascinating research below.


Link

Is there an article that explains why they think it came from a lab?

I thought I read that it wasn't that it was made in a lab, but rather the infected bat was in the lab and met Patient Zero there.

I would like the details, I just haven't seen much about it other than rumors about "Sources".

I think the source for that was apparently there is a biological or bio-weapons testing facility on a few miles from a large wet market. One of the theories short of the Chinese purposefully releasing the virus is that there may have been mishandling, an accident, or an animal escaping then making its way to the market and it spreading from there.

I've also heard a theory that with poor sanitization and so many different species in such close proximity, all sorts of crazy diseases are created in those kinds of markets.

This is the only article I saw:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-china-compete-us-sources

It seems to imply they were doing research. Not that they tried to create a virus.

A month ago, I recounted on this forum, a convo I'd had with my best friend. Ex-military (Col. USAF) Medical Services Specialist. He now heads up Pharm Services at the Dayton VA. He was read in on this weeks before most of us. He knew what the numbers would look like. This dude who has seen in-country service in Iraq, Afghan, and North Africa

"M-Dawg: was this engineered in a lab?"

His answer: "B- we aren't even a 10th of the way towards being able to engineer something like this. This thing is from Nature. It's too perfect to have been made by us dumbasses."

Mark has the data to support such a statement. The real data. He was months ahead of what we're now experiencing. I was only weeks ahead- and only because he's blood- and an instant resource.


Your post supports my convo with my best bud. He would never lie to me, and that's why I can support the message/veracity of the article.

Thanks for posting this.

Time will tell.


Talk about interfering with elections. LOL

We all know what happened here. Some are just happy it did, well, except for the ones who died or will, and their families.


Just look at the numbers of people infected to the population size.


It doesn't add up. This was released. A deliberate attack.

Of course we won’t need proof right? Just suggesting this makes it true. Pfft

Mr pffft will once again be proven right in regards to what’s really important ...

China allowed no one from Wuhan to travel outside of Wuhan into other parts of china ... meanwhile allowing all flights to depart from Wuhan to ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD ...

And thats what really matters here and is the reason were where were at today ...

Look out! There is a run on tin foil! Labs and Bats and China Bad, oh my... smh

This is nature culling the herd. For all we know this thing was frozen in ice for a million years or mutated from a different strand last year... ANYONE suggesting they read or saw proof of anything else needs to check their sources.

This is more my issue, it's really irrelevant how it was created, China allowed millions of people to leave the country while seeing first hand people pilling up in the mourges.

Like I understand the notion that we are the leaders of the world and we should have had more infrastructure to deal with this stuff, especially in places like NYC. The things that absolutely disgust me are that the Orange man bad crew is so quick to come to China's defense at every turn, immediately parroting their [censored] statistics on "no more new cases" to make orange man look bad. Focusing on irrelevant obscure remarks.

Here are the facts as I see them.

• It was CHINA that messed up and China that reacted horribly to this virus.
• Left media, dem senators and the dem presidential candidate at a minimum insinuated the president was racist for considering travel bans.
• ALL media were on record downplaying it as the flu, left and right.
• Fear mongering body counts of 2 million people, no matter what model, is a bad model.
• Despite cries of racism on banning travel....it is proven that only proved to have slowed the travel ban which was 100% the right thing to do. You can make a direct correlation to "Xenephobia" claims to actual deaths.
• Despite Trumps childish pettiness, he is right to show the media their own words. The "how dare he show us videos of ourselves" is a ridiculous notion that makes me hate the media.
  

I often disagree with Bill Maher but he crushed this bit.




Here are some receipts:


















Was this country unprepared when they should have been, I would say yes. Does that buck ultimately stop with Trump, absolutely. Is giving all the governors and mayors of these liberal strongholds that are most affected a pass enraging, absolutely. Is seeing the same liberal strongholds now forming a faction together also enraging, yes.

This had been a partisan pissing match from DAY ONE. Trump should have banned travel in January and just let people call him a racist. Bill Deblasio should be charged criminally for going on TV and telling people it's fine and they should go out to bars. Despite all of that and taking all of it into account, the actions that happened after we knew what it was was pretty solid.....28k deaths? from 2 million, then from 200k, then from 100k then from 60k.

The projections prove it out, while we may not have been as prepared as we should have been, it was handled pretty well across partisan lines.

I honestly don't know who did what.. But there is time to deal with that.

What we need to do now is test, test, test.

We have a population of what, 330 million or so.. Thus far we have tested 3 million.

That's just unacceptable. More tests probably mean more positive tests.. Is it better to hide our heads in the sand, or better to know and react properly?

Also, all this talk about how we've reached the plateau, How do they know with so few tested?

I think part of it is numbers. Just think about the math involved here.

Even if they could manufacture 1 million tests a day, it would take almost a year to have enough to test everyone in the US.

I recall seeing something a couple weeks ago about 1 manufacture THINKS they can produce 50,000 test a day.

I think many people forget (Not necessarily you Daman) this part of the equation when questioning why more people aren't tested.

A lot of it is just plain availability to produce the tests.
That's not even getting to the variable of how many of those tests can be processed once used. Which I recall I saw somewhere that it was one lab stated they could process 2,000 tests a day.


It does seem we are finally getting ability to test more and get results quicker, so I expect to see an exponential increase in numbers tested in the coming weeks. But the start up has been slow, as could be expected for something unknown/

That article just said that creating a virus was unlikeley. It didn't mention the cultivation and propogation of an existing virus. This requires living cell hosts, such as live animals or cultured cells....which the lab in Wuhan that conducted virus experiments utilized. The lab is actually called "Wuhan Institute of Virology". I don't think it's a tin foil hat situation to recognize that this lab is in the same town where COVID-19 originated.
http://english.whiov.cas.cn/

Even this liberal rag feels there's reason for concern:

washingtonpost.com

By
Josh Rogin
Columnist
April 14, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.

In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.

As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.

“Most importantly,” the cable states, “the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”

The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments.

As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.

“The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected,” he said.

There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. That’s important because the Chinese government still refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved.

Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses. The embassy officials were calling for more U.S. attention to this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems.

“The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”

No extra assistance to the labs was provided by the U.S. government in response to these cables. The cables began to circulate again inside the administration over the past two months as officials debated whether the lab could be the origin of the pandemic and what the implications would be for the U.S. pandemic response and relations with China.

Inside the Trump administration, many national security officials have long suspected either the WIV or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab was the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak. According to the New York Times, the intelligence community has provided no evidence to confirm this. But one senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.

“The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.

As my colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese government’s original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats.

The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.

Shi and other WIV researchers have categorically denied this lab was the origin for the novel coronavirus. On Feb. 3, her team was the first to publicly report the virus known as 2019-nCoV was a bat-derived coronavirus.

The Chinese government, meanwhile, has put a total lockdown on information related to the virus origins. Beijing has yet to provide U.S. experts with samples of the novel coronavirus collected from the earliest cases. The Shanghai lab that published the novel coronavirus genome on Jan. 11 was quickly shut down by authorities for “rectification.” Several of the doctors and journalists who reported on the spread early on have disappeared.

On Feb. 14, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a new biosecurity law to be accelerated. On Wednesday, CNN reported the Chinese government has placed severe restrictions requiring approval before any research institution publishes anything on the origin of the novel coronavirus.

The origin story is not just about blame. It’s crucial to understanding how the novel coronavirus pandemic started because that informs how to prevent the next one. The Chinese government must be transparent and answer the questions about the Wuhan labs because they are vital to our scientific understanding of the virus, said Xiao.

We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab, but the cable pointed to the danger there and increases the impetus to find out, he said.

“I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered,” he said. “To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future.”

U.S. senator Chis Murphy D.Conn. stated to Anderson Cooper that this covid 19 has nothing to do with China and blames the pandemic on Pres. Trump.
Man the haters on the left will stoop to any low .


J\C, FYI

...and this thread started off soooooo well.

Have fun believing nonsense and conspiracy theories. I'm done in this thread.

So knowing it was coming in January and doing nothing to ramp up testing and PPE production until March has nothing to do with the death toll?

Got it.

Boo frickin'hoo. Somebody disagreed with you and you run away. Did you read the article I posted? It didn't come from infowars.

Says the dude that is absolutely certain this did not come from a lab. As if he somehow has boot on the ground in China and witnessed it first hand. Anyone claiming they know for certain is a hack.

Talking out of both sides of his mouth to meet his partisan hackery.

"It didn't escape from a lab"

(paraphrasing) "It couldn't have been created in a lab"


Two entirely different things he is trying to lump as one to defend.....China???? It absoluetly could have been an organic virus that they found and were testing, mutated and spread, like why the hell would you even try to deny it?

You do understand that just throwing out an accusation with no basis in fact is no different, right? I mean anyone can make up anything and just spout off about it. You get that, right?

I'm not picking on anyone, I'm just saying that until more,,LOTS MORE folks are tested, thinking about opening up the country to commerce and normal life isn't very bright.

The problem with testing is that BOTH sides dropped the ball. Ohio has the capacity to test all the tests that are sent to them. BUT let me repeat BUT the state can't get enough swabs, or solution to run the tests. Kinds like I was yelling about a few years ago that the government is not ready for problems. We need swabs.... sorry they only make those overseas. We need solution... sorry they only make that overseas. Like I said years ago. This country has gone to hell because we quit manufacturing things ourselves and let other countries take our jobs just to save a few cents for corporations.

Yeah... so let’s get these business open anyway as fast as possible without wide scale testing Pfft fat trump

If only we had started ramping up production a month earlier.....

You do understand what the letters in FEMA stand for, right? Federal Emergency Management Agency.

There is no ESHTFFTA. Each State Has To Fend For Themselves Agency.

We have all 50 states bidding against each other AND FEMA for supplies. Driving the prices up for every state competing for those supplies. And if what you say makes sense, then why were WE shipping supplies to China?

U.S. exported millions in masks and ventilators ahead of the coronavirus crisis

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/inve...rus/5109747002/

Trump administration sent protective medical gear to China while he minimized the virus threat to US

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/29/opinions/...llah/index.html

“On February 7, the WHO warned about the limited stock of PPE. That same day, the Trump administration announced it was sending 18 tons of masks, gowns and respirators to China.”

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/20...ective-equipme/

Then we were told, "Nobody could have seen this coming".

Come on man.

To me, the Federal Government is completely out of their league and it's not getting any better.


This is a massive problem that requires massive amounts of cooperation and planning.

To me, the only way that can be done is people who operate in massive scale.


Essentially, we need a General George Marshall type to be running this operation. Someone in the military who deals with this kind of stuff. Massive supply chains. Massive amounts of ordering. Massive amounts of shipping and coordinating.



This is going to require logistical work, supply chain (and production) work, and medical work. We can't open the Government (which is going to have to happen at some point), until testing is widespread. Hopefully everyone here understands why that's necessary. Yet, we're nowhere near that even happening. Data and planning are what's going to defeat this thing until we have effective treatments/vaccines.

We don't have the data and we don't have the logistics figured out right to make this happen.


I'm not sure how the people that Trump's bring in are going to help. We need like SupplyChain Specialists, deals with manufactures, the logistics folks that work for Amazon and Walmart, and obviously we need doctors.

Our last three four or five Presidents as well as those in government dropped the ball on this. You can't blame this crap on one President. They are ALL to blame on both sides. Don't let your hatred of one side blind you to the facts bro.

Also don't think I don't blame Trump and our government in standing for some of this mess, because IMO they are guilty as well.

I think it's probably a bioweapon and if it's not? It'll do until one comes around.

Actually, no. I don't see why you have to wait until testing is widespread. Once you have a consistent, reliable flow of testing you'll be able to start to identify trends and can make timely decisions based on that.

Being fair isn't allowed in this Forum.

Mandatory testing? Voluntary testing? What do you do with people who test negative? Are they supposed to stay on lock down until a) they contract it naturally and develop an immunity? or b) until a vaccine is created? Then what? Do you make the vaccine mandatory?

I guess if we're going to keep it locked down then we're going to keep locked down. I'm just curious to know if those in favor of locking it down will accept the increase in suicides, overdoses, crime, civil unrest, etc as the cost of that or if they'll deflect and add them to the list of things orange man bad should have prevented.

The real problem is this: the country has shut down. That is not sustainable.

Test everyone? That's great. Until tomorrow. Test me today, and I'm clean? Cool. Next day? I could be positive.

I can only speak for myself, but I think we should continue to lock down. My fear is that folks will dismiss the dangers of the virus as it continues to flatten and then it will rise again.

As far as suicides, overdoses, civil unrest, etc goes.........get a grip. I'm not having any issues w/being locked down. It isn't ideal, but it is reality. I deal w/it and make the best of the situation that I can. I sure as hell am not thinking about suicide. ODing, committing crimes, or causing civil unrest...LOL.

Then again, I am not a Millennial.

That's exactly my point.

It's not a bioweapon.

We've been battling coronaviruses for the last 20+ years. Their signature: jumping from other species to infect humans.

SARS jumped from Civet cats.
MERS jumped from Dromedary camels.
and now CoVID-19, presumably from bats.

Coronavirus is a huge family. And we know that there are a large number of viruses being carried by other species that haven't (yet) jumped to humans. As surveillance improves, more of these viruses will be identified. A ton of them will be of the coronavirus variety.

And the most likely reason for these recently becoming more prevalent is the destruction of natural habitats and human overpopulation. Nature's checks and balances.

But the lab and eating bats origin rumors make it so much easier to hate on China.

I don’t need any more reason to hate China. They are a completely corrupt.

Yes.
This.

And a host of other contributing factors, most of which were prompted by the things we do.

The trend is pretty clear: novel viral strains are going to become an increasingly frequent feature of modern life.

'Tip of the iceberg': is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?

As habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the coronavirus outbreak may be just the beginning of mass pandemics

Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe Forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off.

But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest.

I travelled to Mayibout 2 in 2004 to investigate why deadly diseases new to humans were emerging from biodiversity “hotspots” such as tropical rainforests and bushmeat markets in African and Asian cities.

It took a day by canoe and then many hours along degraded forest logging roads, passing Baka villages and a small goldmine, to reach the village. There, I found traumatised people still fearful that the deadly virus, which kills up to 90% of the people it infects, would return.

Villagers told me how children had gone into the forest with dogs that had killed the chimp. They said that everyone who cooked or ate it got a terrible fever within a few hours. Some died immediately, while others were taken down the river to hospital. A few, like Nesto Bematsick, recovered. “We used to love the forest, now we fear it,” he told me. Many of Bematsick’s family members died.

Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harbouring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans such as Ebola, HIV and dengue.

But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise – with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. In fact, a new discipline, planetary health, is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections between the wellbeing of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems.

Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today?

“We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbour so many species of animals and plants – and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses,” David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote in the New York Times. “We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”

Increasing threat

Research suggests that outbreaks of animal-borne and other infectious diseases such as Ebola, Sars, bird flu and now Covid-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, are on the rise. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans, and many are able to spread quickly to new places. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals.

Some, like rabies and plague, crossed from animals centuries ago. Others, such as Marburg, which is thought to be transmitted by bats, are still rare. A few, like Covid-19, which emerged last year in Wuhan, China, and Mers, which is linked to camels in the Middle East, are new to humans and spreading globally.

Other diseases that have crossed into humans include Lassa fever, which was first identified in 1969 in Nigeria; Nipah from Malaysia; and Sars from China, which killed more than 700 people and travelled to 30 countries in 2002–03. Some, like Zika and West Nile virus, which emerged in Africa, have mutated and become established on other continents.

Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at UCL, calls emerging animal-borne infectious diseases an “increasing and very significant threat to global health, security and economies”.

Amplification effect

n 2008, Jones and a team of researchers identified 335 diseases that emerged between 1960 and 2004, at least 60% of which came from animals.

Increasingly, says Jones, these zoonotic diseases are linked to environmental change and human behaviour. The disruption of pristine forests driven by logging, mining, road building through remote places, rapid urbanisation and population growth is bringing people into closer contact with animal species they may never have been near before, she says.

The resulting transmission of disease from wildlife to humans, she says, is now “a hidden cost of human economic development. There are just so many more of us, in every environment. We are going into largely undisturbed places and being exposed more and more. We are creating habitats where viruses are transmitted more easily, and then we are surprised that we have new ones.”

Jones studies how changes in land use contribute to the risk. “We are researching how species in degraded habitats are likely to carry more viruses which can infect humans,” she says. “Simpler systems get an amplification effect. Destroy landscapes, and the species you are left with are the ones humans get the diseases from.”

“There are countless pathogens out there continuing to evolve which at some point could pose a threat to humans,” says Eric Fevre, chair of veterinary infectious diseases at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Infection and Global Health. “The risk [of pathogens jumping from animals to humans] has always been there.”

The difference between now and a few decades ago, Fevre says, is that diseases are likely to spring up in both urban and natural environments. “We have created densely packed populations where alongside us are bats and rodents and birds, pets and other living things. That creates intense interaction and opportunities for things to move from species to species,” he says.

Tip of the iceberg

“Pathogens do not respect species boundaries,” says disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor in Emory University’s department of environmental sciences, who studies how shrinking natural habitats and changing behaviour add to the risk of diseases spilling over from animals to humans.

“I am not at all surprised about the coronavirus outbreak,” he says. “The majority of pathogens are still to be discovered. We are at the very tip of the iceberg.”

Humans, says Gillespie, are creating the conditions for the spread of diseases by reducing the natural barriers between host animals – in which the virus is naturally circulating – and themselves. “We fully expect the arrival of pandemic influenza; we can expect large-scale human mortalities; we can expect other pathogens with other impacts. A disease like Ebola is not easily spread. But something with a mortality rate of Ebola spread by something like measles would be catastrophic,” Gillespie says.

Wildlife everywhere is being put under more stress, he says. “Major landscape changes are causing animals to lose habitats, which means species become crowded together and also come into greater contact with humans. Species that survive change are now moving and mixing with different animals and with humans.”
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Gillespie sees this in the US, where suburbs fragment forests and raise the risk of humans contracting Lyme disease. “Altering the ecosystem affects the complex cycle of the Lyme pathogen. People living close by are more likely to get bitten by a tick carrying Lyme bacteria,” he says.

Yet human health research seldom considers the surrounding natural ecosystems, says Richard Ostfeld, distinguished senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. He and others are developing the emerging discipline of planetary health, which looks at the links between human and ecosystem health.

“There’s misapprehension among scientists and the public that natural ecosystems are the source of threats to ourselves. It’s a mistake. Nature poses threats, it is true, but it’s human activities that do the real damage. The health risks in a natural environment can be made much worse when we interfere with it,” he says.

Ostfeld points to rats and bats, which are strongly linked with the direct and indirect spread of zoonotic diseases. “Rodents and some bats thrive when we disrupt natural habitats. They are the most likely to promote transmissions [of pathogens]. The more we disturb the forests and habitats the more danger we are in,” he says.

Felicia Keesing, professor of biology at Bard College, New York, studies how environmental changes influence the probability that humans will be exposed to infectious diseases. “When we erode biodiversity, we see a proliferation of the species most likely to transmit new diseases to us, but there’s also good evidence that those same species are the best hosts for existing diseases,” she wrote in an email to Ensia, the nonprofit media outlet that reports on our changing planet.

The market connection

Disease ecologists argue that viruses and other pathogens are also likely to move from animals to humans in the many informal markets that have sprung up to provide fresh meat to fast-growing urban populations around the world. Here, animals are slaughtered, cut up and sold on the spot.

The “wet market” (one that sells fresh produce and meat) in Wuhan, thought by the Chinese government to be the starting point of the current Covid-19 pandemic, was known to sell numerous wild animals, including live wolf pups, salamanders, crocodiles, scorpions, rats, squirrels, foxes, civets and turtles.

Equally, urban markets in west and central Africa sell monkeys, bats, rats, and dozens of species of bird, mammal, insect and rodent slaughtered and sold close to open refuse dumps and with no drainage.

“Wet markets make a perfect storm for cross-species transmission of pathogens,” says Gillespie. “Whenever you have novel interactions with a range of species in one place, whether that is in a natural environment like a forest or a wet market, you can have a spillover event.”

The Wuhan market, along with others that sell live animals, has been shut by the Chinese authorities, and last month Beijing outlawed the trading and eating of wild animals except for fish and seafood. But bans on live animals being sold in urban areas or informal markets are not the answer, say some scientists.

“The wet market in Lagos is notorious. It’s like a nuclear bomb waiting to happen. But it’s not fair to demonise places which do not have fridges. These traditional markets provide much of the food for Africa and Asia,” says Jones.

“These markets are essential sources of food for hundreds of millions of poor people, and getting rid of them is impossible,” says Delia Grace, a senior epidemiologist and veterinarian with the International Livestock Research Institute, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya. She argues that bans force traders underground, where they may pay less attention to hygiene.

Fevre and colleague Cecilia Tacoli, principal researcher in the human settlements research group at the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED), argue in a blog post that rather than pointing the finger at wet markets, we should look at the burgeoning trade in wild animals.

“It is wild animals rather than farmed animals that are the natural hosts of many viruses,” they write. “Wet markets are considered part of the informal food trade that is often blamed for contributing to spreading disease. But … evidence shows the link between informal markets and disease is not always so clear cut.”

Changing behaviour

So what, if anything, can we do about all of this?

Jones says that change must come from both rich and poor societies. Demand for wood, minerals and resources from the global north leads to the degraded landscapes and ecological disruption that drives disease, she says. “We must think about global biosecurity, find the weak points and bolster the provision of health care in developing countries. Otherwise we can expect more of the same,” she adds.

“The risks are greater now. They were always present and have been there for generations. It is our interactions with that risk which must be changed,” says Brian Bird, a research virologist at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine One Health Institute, where he leads Ebola-related surveillance activities in Sierra Leone and elsewhere.

“We are in an era now of chronic emergency,” Bird says. “Diseases are more likely to travel further and faster than before, which means we must be faster in our responses. It needs investments, change in human behaviour, and it means we must listen to people at community levels.”

Getting the message about pathogens and disease to hunters, loggers, market traders and consumers is key, Bird says. “These spillovers start with one or two people. The solutions start with education and awareness. We must make people aware things are different now. I have learned from working in Sierra Leone with Ebola-affected people that local communities have the hunger and desire to have information,” he says. “They want to know what to do. They want to learn.”

Fevre and Tacoli advocate rethinking urban infrastructure, particularly within low-income and informal settlements. “Short-term efforts are focused on containing the spread of infection,” they write. “The longer term – given that new infectious diseases will likely continue to spread rapidly into and within cities – calls for an overhaul of current approaches to urban planning and development.”

The bottom line, Bird says, is to be prepared. “We can’t predict where the next pandemic will come from, so we need mitigation plans to take into account the worst possible scenarios,” he says. “The only certain thing is that the next one will certainly come.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/...aoe#maincontent

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